The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I first came of voting age — we’re talking 1968 —the Viet Nam War was raging, the draft was mandatory, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been assassinated, the country was definitely polarized. At the time I thought the government needed overthrowing. The CIA was involved in coup plots worldwide, the FBI was keeping ‘enemy’ files, ‘tin soldiers and Nixon coming’, the country was on fire, cities were burning, campuses were rioting. Me and my armchair revolutionaries wanted change and we wanted it Now.

Fast forward more than a half century. Maybe not wiser, but I’m a lot older than I was then. The new mantra of move fast and break things, advocated by the Tech Boyz, doesn’t ring true to me anymore. It’s not like the USA is a broken despotic nation in need of radical rebooting. More to my liking these days is a policy of meddling at the margins, fixing those things that are in need of repair, leaving what does work the hell alone.

But that’s not what we’re seeing in the first 100 days of the new regime. Tinkering is out, chainsawing is the tool of the new architects. Behind some of their onslaught you can barely make out a strategy, something on the line of unfettered capitalism and the destruction of global interdependence. Get rid of burdensome regulations and pesky law firms, give corporations free rein and things will be better. If you have to circumvent Constitutional norms, so be it. If it takes an authoritarian leader to institute those changes, fine. These new radicals won’t say it out loud, but they definitely believe it: democracy doesn’t work.

So maybe the chickens have come home to roost for us 60’s activists. The government of MAGA and MUSK is the manifestation of our own paranoia long ago. Like the rich and privileged character in the Big Lebowski said to the Dude, “Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?”

I hear these folks loud and clear….

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2025 at 4:53 am and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.